Categories

So You Think You Can Write – I hope so!

Before I even start, that’s twice now that I’ve typed So You Think You Can Wright (seriously!) It’s not a great look! 🙂

If you’re in romance writing land, and especially if unpublished, I think you’d have to be hiding inside a non-internet connected igloo if you haven’t heard about Harlequin’s global competition, So You Think You Can Write. (There – wrote write without the ght but I had to really concentrate).

I first saw news of the competition on the RWA Cruisin the Blogs. I checked it out but I didn’t think His Brand Of Beautiful fit any of their categories. I confess that whether it fits any of their categories or not, I don’t feel personally that it fits Harlequin’s style – but then I figure there’s nothing to lose by entering. So it’s in as a Super Romance, which has a wordcount of 80,000 and is the longest HQN publish (other than MIRA I think but MIRA wasn’t offered as a choice for the competition).

So on Saturday morning I sat down before the AFL Grand Final to submit my entry. It took forever. You have to write (god I did ght again, what is going on this morning??) a 100 word pitch, which is harder than it sounds and apparently you were supposed to include the HEA in that 100 words too (oops). In recent days I’ve had to write a 200 word synopsis and now a 100 word pitch. Pretty soon I’m sure we’ll be down to 140 characters in a tweet to ‘hook’ readers/agents/editors/publishers…

Well, then I couldn’t seem to get a confirmation email which the site said I should get, and then the FAQs said any problems, email Tech Support… except Technical Support only work 9-5, Mon-Friday and the competition entries closed on September 30 (Sunday). All of which had me thinking I’d left it all too late and I was likely to miss out. So I emailed the lovely Tech Support people and said something along the lines of: “if I miss out so be it but this is what I did and perhaps you could let me know either way if it did, or didn’t make it…”

And this morning there’s notification that they’ve uploaded it on my behalf. So I’m in. Officially.

The public can vote on the entries. I think the top 25 go through to the second round and HQN have 3 wildcard entries they can pick. Some of the comments on the Twitter feed at HQN’s site talk about whether it’s a ‘popularity’ contest or a writing contest, but I think the 3 Wildcards are there to help that in some respects.

Anyway, let’s see how we go. Here is the link to His Brand Of Beautiful. If you have a chance to read it and you like what you’re reading, I would be thrilled if you’d give it the thumb’s up. When I look at it versus other stories it seems a world away from what people are entering. Which I guess either means I’m doing something wrong; or I’m just not in the style they’re looking for. Time will tell. Here’s the link and thanks in advance: http://www.soyouthinkyoucanwrite.com/manuscripts/his-brand-of-beautiful/